I recently finished listening to an audiobook version of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath. The nonfiction piece focuses on how being an underdog can occasionally confer advantages that the “overdog” doesn’t expect.

The book uses a wide-range of examples of underdogs overcoming their disadvantages and actually using them as jumping off points to topple bigger and stronger opponents.

This isn’t a new idea to me or the world. Scholars were peddling this theory at least 1,500 years ago when the Roman Empire fell. I first read about it in Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterpiece, Dune, where the fictional race of Freman are hardened by their desert homeland and are able to overcome the forces of the Padishah Emperor. Continue reading →

I’ve uploaded my highlights from Twitch to Youtube and I’ve been posting some edited highlights as well.

Twitch is rather limited in how you can edit a highlight. The highlighted video has to be a specific section of the video and that’s it. No other modifications allowed.

So if you wanted to create a highlight that combined a section from the first minute and the last minute of your broadcast, but nothing in between… Twitch’s in browser editing application doesn’t let you do that.

Fortunately, as I’m streaming I also set my streaming software to store the broadcasts to my hard drive. From there I can edit the videos and produce a better finished product.

They’re pretty basic. I highlighted a specific card in each video from my early Arena runs on my Twitch stream. I edited all the shots of those cards together and slapped some music on it.

Playing with my new editing software was fun. I started using Movie Maker which is a freeware editing program put out by Microsoft.

I took a video production course in high school that helped me learn the basics of video editing. The program I learned on was called Final Cut Pro.

I’d like to use Final Cut again. It has a lot of things that Movie Maker doesn’t. But it also costs $300. 😦

The first hurdle I had to jump over with Movie Maker was the file type for the recorded videos from my stream.

Almost every internet video site, Twitch included, broadcasts their videos using the Flash file type (.flv). My broadcasting software saves the recorded videos to my hard drive as Flash videos as well.

Movie Maker can’t understand Flash videos. Kind of dumb considering that Flash is the most popular video type now, but whatever.

I had to download a converter to change the recordings into something that Movie Maker could understand.

After that it was simple enough, throw the video in, pick which sections I want, delete the other sections, etc.

I remember Final Cut being easier to work with and having more options than Movie Maker.

Movie Maker hides transitions under the Animations tab. Adding titles is also hidden under the home tab.

I’m still unsure if Movie Maker allows custom title movements, cropping a frame, moving a frame, or even multiple audio tracks.

It might that I just can’t find these things yet within Movie Maker’s interface or maybe there’s nothing there for me to find.

I’ll stick with Movie Maker f it does have those options and I find them. Final Cut’s software is better because I know how to use it. Once I’ve mastered Movie Maker there won’t be any reason to switch.

Go check out the videos if you like Hearthstone! I added in some public domain music from Youtube’s audio library. Enjoy!

Twitch answered my questions about whether copyrighted music is allowed on live streams in a recent email/blog post.

Unless I get permission from the artist/label, the answer is “NO!”

Twitch recently did a restructuring of their website. This included Twitch’s precursor website Justin.tv.

Justin.tv has been removed and Twitch is now focusing on their more profitable product, Twitch.tv.

They’re also attempting to make Twitch more profitable by reducing the amount of storage space they’re using for the website.

Previously, a streamer like me could store ALL their past broadcasts on Twitch.

Not many people watch those and it requires Twitch to have a lot of hard drive space to store them.

With the benefit of this infinite storage being next to nothing for Twitch, they’re removing that service.

Past broadcasts are now saved for about a week. That week allows a streamer to cut out the best portions as highlights to save forever.

The removal of Justin.tv and the extra storage space both sound like smart ideas to me. Twitch saves money and the majority of their users don’t care.

The audio protection also makes sense, but a lot of people are upset about it.

Audible Magic is a service that identifies copyrighted music and flags it for Twitch.

Flagged videos then have the 30 minute section around that copyrighted portion muted. That seems excessive to me for what could’ve been a 30 second clip of music, but whatever.

But that’s only for videos, the past broadcasts that Twitch is removing and highlights that might contain copyrighted material.

Audible Magic will not be screening live streams on Twitch for copyrighted material, so thousands of streamers can still get away with playing copyrighted music in live streams.

I’d prefer not to do that. If I really want my Twitch channel to succeed in a big way I cannot break the law to do so. Twitch has made it clear, playing copyrighted music without permission to do so is not okay.

A lot of high profile streamers use public domain music, so that’s where I’ll be going next.

There’s a lot of places to look for music I can use. If anybody has any suggestions, feel free to let me know!

I’ve been thinking about including music on my streams and Youtube channel.

There’s just this problem of what music I’m able to include.

I want to play my typical playlists that I listen to on my own.

But all that stuff is copyrighted!

I can’t play The Beatles, Elvis, or Johnny Cash. I can’t play the modern stuff I like like Katy Perry, Ke$ha, or Barenaked Ladies. Not without getting slapped by a copyright notice.

Youtube has software that searches a video when its uploaded for copyrighted music.

If Youtube finds copyrighted music, it plays an ad before the video. The revenue from the ad goes toward the owner of the music.

Additionally a link to iTunes appears below the video so that someone can buy the music played in the song.

I could live with that eventually, but when I setup my Youtube channel I was looking forward to the possibility of making money off of it. If I use copyrighted music, then the ad revenue goes to the owner of the music instead of to me.

One of my ideas was to play music while streaming and then using editing software to eliminate the music from the audio track.

I have a theory for how I could do that, but I’m not confident that it will work successfully.

If I can’t get that to work then I either can’t play music during my streams, or I can’t profit directly from uploading clips of my Twitch streams to Youtube.

A separate problem that I hadn’t considered is whether its legal to play copyrighted music while streaming.

I’d need to relook at Twitch’s license agreement that I barely skimmed when I first agreed to it.

If it turns out that I’m not allowed to play stuff there then only one option remains for playing music on my Twitch and Youtube channels.

Public domain music.

I have close to zero experience with public domain music and no idea how I’ll find stuff that I will like or that will be appropriate.

I started up a Youtube channel to connect to my Twitch channel. The Youtube channel is called GoCorralTV.

I’m also in the process of setting up a Facebook page for GoCorral. With that done I’ll have a unified presence for the website across multiple different sites.

I’ve also been toying with the idea of renaming my game and forum accounts to GoCorral. I think I’ll wait on that. If I get a ton more viewers it will make sense just to reduce confusion, but right now it would just cause confusion amongst my friends instead of removing it for other viewers/readers.

Back to that Youtube channel though.

I haven’t made it look pretty and amazing yet, but I did link it to my Twitch channel.

The link allows me to move the highlights that I create on Twitch over to the Youtube channel.

Twitch allows you to create highlights from saved broadcasts.

I’d thought I was saving my broadcasts, but apparently I was mistaken. My first two are now gone from Twitch.

I still have the recordings saved on my computer, but there’s no way to reupload them to Twitch.

Highlights are sections taken from a broadcast and turned into their own video. They’re meant to show off a cool play that you made.

I made one from each of the saved broadcasts I have up so far. One is a cool play and the other is a game where my cat sat on my lap looking cute while I played.

I showed the highlights to my wife this morning and she confirmed my suspicions that the audio quality is bad.

My headset mic broke a few months ago. The earpieces work fine and I still have a mic on my video camera for talking to my friends. The mic isn’t that great for recordings where I’m not directly interacting with people.

I’m going to do two things to fix this.

#1 Get a new headset. I ordered one this morning.

#2 Enunciate my words better. I have acting experience from high school. I should better at this!